Before your head starts swiveling around with the mistaken belief that they redeemed themselves
after years of bad choices, however, consider: How could they not?

The 66th annual Emmy nominations — announced yesterday, with the awards ceremony set for Aug. 25
— seemed almost foolproof, mostly because the rumors of a golden age of television are greatly
exaggerated.

Television has its greatness, as the Emmys recognize.

Yet the greatness bobs along on a sea of bad to mediocre shows, especially on broadcast
networks.

Did you really think
2 Broke Girls would earn a nomination over
Veep? Or
Revenge over
Masters of Sex?

HBO, as always, scored big, with
Game of Thrones leading all contenders with 19 nominations, including best drama.

Other HBO shows — including
Veep, newcomer
Silicon Valley and the miniseries
True Detective — also drew nominations, with
True Detective star Matthew McConaughey vying for best actor in a drama against co-star
Woody Harrelson as well as Bryan Cranston of
Breaking Bad, Jeff Daniels of
The Newsroom, Jon Hamm of
Mad Men and Kevin Spacey of
House of Cards.

Overall, HBO needed just one more nomination to hit the 100 mark this year.

FX received 45; Showtime, 24; and Comedy Central, 21. Many of the premium-cable numbers were
down, but that can be attributed to greater competition from other cable networks and
broadband.

CBS led the broadcast world with 47 nominations; NBC had 46; ABC lagged with 37; PBS had 34; and
Fox — whose entertainment chief, Kevin Reilly, just exited — pulled only 18.

Other than PBS, all the major broadcast networks were down in Emmy nominations — in part because
of the continued growth of broadband television.

Netflix earned 31 nominations this year, up from 14 last year — scoring a fat handful of acting
nominations for its two hits,
Orange Is the New Black and
House of Cards.

And, although Amazon and Hulu didn’t make the cut this year, they remain factors in the
radically shifting paradigm of content platforms.

The Emmys are not only paying more attention to how we access TV shows but also recognizing
quality among the shows more quickly. This year, they understood that
True Detective, the FX miniseries
Fargo and HBO’s
Silicon Valley merited nominations.

AMC’s
Breaking Bad, still greatly missed, received 16 nominations for its last season; and
Mad Men pulled a respectable eight nominations after an up-and-down half of its bisected
final season.

Among the clinkers in the Emmy punch bowl: the nods for Melissa McCarthy as actress in a comedy
series for
Mike & Molly and as guest actress in a comedy series for her hosting of
Saturday Night Live;
The White Queen, an enjoyable but unremarkable Starz miniseries; and Michelle Dockery, who
is likewise unremarkable in
Downton Abbey.

On the flip side, what about James Spader and
TheBlacklist?

Spader’s work is monumental in the NBC show, but the series was recognized only with a
nomination for stunt coordination.